Quantitative Properties of English Verb Valency

With the frequency data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the valency information in the Valency Dictionary of English, the paper investigates quantitative properties of English verb valency. The results show: (1) the number of variants of English verbs follows the positive negative binomial distribution; (2) the complementation patterns of verbs and adjectives in English follow a power law, while that of nouns obeys the Zipf-Mandelbrot distribution; (3) the greater the valency of a verb, the shorter the verb is; (4) in comparison with less frequent verbs, the frequent ones have greater valency; (5) the greater the polysemy of a word, the greater its valency is.